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Ailing cranberry industry finds new life overseas

By Katie Zezima
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, BOSTON
Sunday, Nov 30, 2008, Page 12

Workers harvest cranberries in a Willows Cranberries bog in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Oct. 30. Willows Cranberries owns about 14 hectares of working cranberry bogs in Wareham and Plymouth. It’s peak cranberry-buying season for Americans, but the industry is pushing hard for sales overseas. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Eight years ago, the cranberry industry was in crisis. A glut of berries had cut prices to record lows and farmers were going out of business. The industry’s solution was to start selling this uniquely US crop overseas.

“We had to find new markets” to survive, said Jeffrey LaFleur, president of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association, which represents cranberry farmers in Massachusetts.

The state ranks second in cranberry production, behind Wisconsin. New Jersey is third.

Last year, about 30 percent of US-grown cranberries were exported, accounting for US$133 million in sales.

“We’ve made a concerted effort to look at international markets, and now it’s our focus,” said Toby Stapleton, a spokesman for the Cranberry Marketing Committee, based in Wareham, Massachusetts.

Moreover, despite a near-record cranberry crop this year, demand is outstripping supply. Growers are looking for more land, and Ocean Spray recently opened a large processing plant in Wisconsin.

Three-year-old Curtis Wheeler, whose parents Barbara and Don Wheeler help Willows Cranberries during dry harvest, eats just-picked cranberries in a Willows Cranberries bog in Wareham, Massachusetts, on Oct. 30. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

“We’ve seen growers looking for additional acreage to grow our industry, and state and federal regulators are looking at the wetland permitting process so it makes more sense for the growers,” said Tom Lochner, executive director of the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association.

“Cranberries are one of the few bright spots of the economy of central Wisconsin,” Lochner said.

To many foreign palates, the bright, bitter berry was exotic, if not bizarre. So Ocean Spray, which processes about 70 percent of the nation’s cranberry crop, started selling the “cranberry mystique,” which “speaks to the taste, the health and the heritage of cranberries,” company president Stewart Gallagher said.

“Some say it’s a polarizing taste,” Gallagher said. “But sometimes being polarizing is better than being plain vanilla.”

The cranberry was presented as something distinctly American, both delicious to eat and beautiful to behold. Foreign journalists are invited to southeastern Massachusetts or central Wisconsin each fall to watch the harvest, where the cranberry plants rise to the top of a flooded bog, and the berries are raked off.

Cranberries are also promoted as something of a superfruit, with the industry providing medical studies showing that cranberry juice may help prevent urinary tract infections, and playing up its antioxidant properties.

“It’s been a big part of the underpinning of our whole marketing strategy,” Gallagher said, “particularly in the Asian market, where food is looked at as medicine.”

The company created a number of new products for the Japanese market, including a carbonated cranberry drink and cranberry-flavored water. Sales in Japan account for about 5 percent of Ocean Spray’s overseas sales.

“It’s the most different market in which we operate,” Gallagher said.

There were also linguistic hurdles. The word “cranberry” does not exist in Spanish, so marketers started calling the fruit arandano rojo or “red blueberry” in Spain. Australia, Britain, Canada and Germany consume the most cranberries.

At the German premiere of the Sex and the City movie, the Cranberry Marketing Committee handed out gift bags with kits to make cosmopolitan cocktails, because “you can’t make a cosmo without cranberry juice,” Stapleton said.

In France, cranberry juice is blended with mango juice, one of the country’s more popular beverages. In Australia and Britain, cranberry sauce is becoming a popular side dish.

The berry has undergone a bit of a makeover in domestic and foreign markets with the addition of the sweetened dried cranberry, which makes it easier to add the fruit to baked goods and other foods. Ocean Spray calls the sweetened dried cranberries Craisins.

“For the most part, the products that sell here sell somewhere else,” Gallagher said.
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